THE leading electrician of Germany is Dr. Ernst Werner Siemens, eldest brother of the same distinguished family of which our own Sir William Siemens was a member. Ernst, like his brother William, was born at Lenthe, near Hanover, on December 13, 1816. He was educated at the College of Lubeck in Maine, and entered the Prussian Artillery service as a volunteer. He pursued his scientific studies at the Artillery and Engineers' School in Berlin, and in 1838 obtained an officer's commission.

Physics and chemistry were his favourite studies; and his original researches in electro-gilding resulted in a Prussian patent in 1841. The following year he, in conjunction with his brother William, took out another patent for a differential regulator. In 1844 he was appointed to a post in the artillery workshops in Berlin, where he learned telegraphy, and in 1845 patented a dial and printing telegraph, which is still in use in Germany.

In 1846, he was made a member of a commission organised in Berlin to introduce electric telegraphs in place of the optical ones hitherto employed in Prussia, and he succeeded in getting the commission to adopt underground telegraph lines. For the insulation of the wires he recommended gutta-percha, which was then becoming known as an insulator. In the following year he constructed a machine for covering copper wire with the melted gum by means of pressure; and this machine is substantially the same as that now used for the purpose in cable factories.

In 1848, when the war broke out with Denmark, he was sent to Kiel where, together with his brother-in-law, Professor C. Himly, he laid the first submarine mines, fired by electricity and thus protected the town of Kiel from the advance of the enemies' fleet.

Of late years the German Government has laid a great network of underground lines between the various towns and fortresses of the empire; preferring them to overhead lines as being less liable to interruption from mischief, accident, hostile soldiers, or stress of weather. The first of such lines was, however, laid as long ago as 1848, by Werner Siemens, who, in the autumn of that year, deposited a subterranean cable between Berlin and Frankfort-on-the-Main. Next year a second cable was laid from the Capital to Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Verviers.

In 1847 the subject of our memoir had, along with Mr. Halske, founded a telegraph factory, and he now left the army to give himself up to scientific work and the development of his business. This factory prospered well, and is still the chief continental works of the kind. The new departure made by Werner Siemens was fortunate for electrical science; and from then till now a number of remarkable inventions have proceeded from his laboratory.

The following are the more notable advances made:—In October 1845, a machine for the measurement of small intervals of time, and the speed of electricity by means of electric sparks, and its application in 1875 for measuring the speed of the electric current in overland lines.

In January 1850, a paper on telegraph lines and apparatus, in which the theory of the electro-static charge in insulated wires, as well as methods and formula: for the localising of faults in underground wires were first established. In 1851, the firm erected the first automatic fire telegraphs in Berlin, and in the same year, Werner Siemens wrote a treatise on the experience gained with the underground lines of the Prussian telegraph system. The difficulty of communicating through long underground lines led him to the invention of automatic translation, which was afterwards improved upon by Steinheil, and, in 1852, he furnished the Warsaw-Petersburg line with automatic fast-speed writers. The messages were punched in a paper band by means of the well-known Siemens' lever punching apparatus, and then automatically transmitted in a clockwork instrument.

In 1854 the discovery (contemporaneous with that of Frischen) of simultaneous transmission of messages in opposite directions, and multiplex transmission of messages by means of electro-magnetic apparatus. The 'duplex' system which is now employed both on land lines and submarine cables had been suggested however, before this by Dr. Zetsche, Gintl, and others.

In 1856 he invented the Siemens' magneto-electric dial instrument giving alternate currents. From this apparatus originated the well-known Siemens' armature, and from the receiver was developed the Siemens' polarised relay, with which the working of submarine and other lines could be effected with alternate currents; and in the same year, during the laying of the Cagliari to Bona cable, he constructed and first applied the dynamometer, which has become of such importance in the operations of cable laying.

In 1857, he investigated the electro-static induction and retardation of currents in insulated wires, a phenomenon which he had observed in 1850, and communicated an account of it to the French Academy of Sciences.

'In these researches he developed mathematically Faraday's theory of molecular induction, and thereby paved the way in great measure for its general acceptance.' His ozone apparatus, his telegraph instrument working with alternate currents, and his instrument for translating on and automatically discharging submarine cables also belong to the year 1857. The latter instruments were applied to the Sardinia, Malta, and Corfu cable.

In 1859, he constructed an electric log; he discovered that a dielectric is heated by induction; he introduced the well known Siemens' mercury unit, and many improvements in the manufacture of resistance coils. He also investigated the law of change of resistance in wires by heating; and published several formulae and methods for testing resistances and determining 'faults' by measuring resistances. These methods were adopted by the electricians of the Government service in Prussia, and by Messrs. Siemens Brothers in London, during the manufacture of the Malta to Alexandria cable, which, was, we believe, the first long cable subjected to a system of continuous tests.

'In 1861, he showed that the electrical resistance of molten alloys is equal to the sum of the resistances of the separate metals, and that latent heat increases the specific resistance of metals in a greater degree than free heat.' In 1864 he made researches on the heating of the sides of a Leyden jar by the electrical discharge. In 1866 he published the general theory of dynamo-electric machines, and the principle of accumulating the magnetic effect, a principle which, however, had been contemporaneously discovered by Mr. S. A. Varley, and described in a patent some years before by Mr. Soren Hjorth, a Danish inventor. Hjorth's patent is to be found in the British Patent Office Library, and until lately it was thought that he was the first and true inventor of the 'dynamo' proper, but we understand there is a prior inventor still, though we have not seen the evidence in support of the statement.

The reversibility of the dynamo was enunciated by Werner Siemens in 1867; but it was not experimentally demonstrated on any practical scale until 1870, when M. Hippolite Fontaine succeeded in pumping water at the Vienna international exhibition by the aid of two dynamos connected in circuit; one, the generator, deriving motion from a hydraulic engine, and in turn setting in motion the receiving dynamo which worked the pump. Professor Clerk Maxwell thought this discovery the greatest of the century; and the remark has been repeated more than once. But it is a remark which derives its chief importance from the man who made it, and its credentials from the paradoxical surprise it causes. The discovery in question is certainly fraught with very great consequences to the mechanical world; but in itself it is no discovery of importance, and naturally follows from Faraday's far greater and more original discovery of magneto-electric generation.

In 1874, Dr. Siemens published a treatise on the laying and testing of submarine cables. In 1875, 1876 and 1877, he investigated the action of light on crystalline selenium, and in 1878 he studied the action of the telephone.

The recent work of Dr. Siemens has been to improve the pneumatic railway, railway signalling, electric lamps, dynamos, electro-plating and electric railways. The electric railway at Berlin in 1880, and Paris in 1881, was the beginning of electric locomotion, a subject of great importance and destined in all probability, to very wide extension in the immediate future. Dr. Siemens has received many honours from learned societies at home and abroad; and a title equivalent to knighthood from the German Government.